BREAKING: Guo Wengui guilty in 9 of 12 fraud counts. He faces decades in prison. He gained wealth and influence by cozying up to politically powerful people in two VERY different systems, China and the U.S. Guo is set to be sentenced Nov 19. https://t.co/h04rU7Dcb7
— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike) July 16, 2024
Back in 2017, the first time I posted about Guo Wengwui, then better known as Miles Kwok, the NYTimes article was headlined “As Trump Meets Xi at Mar-a-Lago, There’s a ‘Wild Card’”. (I thought it read like “a Trollope novel, as written by John le Carre.”) Guo Wengwui came to my attention again in July 2019, in March 2023 (when he was arrested alongside his crony Steve Bannon), and in April 2023 (when he was denied bail, and accused of ‘subsidizing Bannon & Giuliani’). Today, the Associated Press reports, “Self-exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui convicted of defrauding followers after fleeing to US”:
Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese business tycoon whose criticism of the Communist Party won him legions of online followers and powerful friends in the American conservative movement, was convicted by a U.S. jury Tuesday of engaging in a massive multiyear fraud that ripped off some of his most devoted fans.
Once believed to be among the richest people in China, Guo was arrested in New York in March of 2023 and accused of operating a racketeering enterprise that stretched from 2018 through 2023.
Over a seven-week trial, he was accused of deceiving thousands of people who put money into bogus investments and using the money to preserve a luxurious lifestyle. He was convicted of nine of 12 criminal counts, including racketeering conspiracy.
Guo’s lawyers said prosecutors hadn’t proven he’d cheated anyone…
“It’s not a crime to be wealthy,” [Guo lawyer] Kamaraju said. “It is not a crime to live in luxury or to spend money on nice things. It’s not a crime to have a yacht or a jet or to wear nice suits. It may not be our lifestyle. It may be odd. It may even be off-putting to some, but it’s not a crime.”
The prosecutor, Finkel, said everyone agreed that Guo was targeted by China’s Communist Party, but that did not give Guo “a license to rob from these people.”
Finkel said Guo also created a “blacklist” of his enemies and posted their personal information online. When the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated him, Guo organized protests against the agency and claimed that it had been infiltrated by China’s Communist Party. And when a bankruptcy trustee was appointed by a judge to represent Guo’s creditors, Finkel said Guo’s followers protested outside the home of the trustee’s children and outside an elementary school where one of them taught.
Truly, the phrase Everything Trump Touches Dies remains a touchstone for our debased era.
Full credit to Mr. Forsythe’s NYTimes excellent update — “Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud”. Here’s a gift link:
Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who transformed himself from a Beijing insider into a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party and a favorite of the American right, was convicted on Tuesday of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Guo, also known as Miles Guo, was accused of using a number of schemes — club memberships, cryptocurrencies, a sale of private shares in his media company — to fleece his followers and maintain a lavish lifestyle. On the fourth day of deliberations, a jury in the Southern District of New York found him guilty on nine of 12 charges, including racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Set to be sentenced on Nov. 19, Mr. Guo could face decades in prison or the remote possibility of extradition to China.
In a trial lasting almost two months, government prosecutors highlighted rambling videos Mr. Guo had made for his thousands of supporters, often guaranteeing no losses on their investments. The proceeds helped pay for a mansion in New Jersey, a Lamborghini roadster and a $100 million investment in a hedge fund. Prosecutors also drew on bank records, invoices and the testimony of Mr. Guo’s former employees and jilted investors, who had been drawn to a wealthy Beijing expatriate dedicated to ending the seven-decade rule of the Chinese Communist Party…
The conviction is the end point of a remarkable trajectory for Mr. Guo, who made his original fortune in China building hotels and acquiring a brokerage company. Along the way, he allied himself with Ma Jian, a senior intelligence official in the country’s feared Ministry of State Security. Mr. Guo used his access to sensitive information to take down people who stood in his way, including a deputy mayor of Beijing who opposed his plans to build a massive office and hotel complex next to the site of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Mr. Guo’s time in China came to an abrupt end in 2015, after Mr. Ma was detained by the government. Mr. Guo fled to America and bought a $68 million Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park, winning the approval of the building’s co-op board with the help of a recommendation letter from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mr. Guo may be unique in that he thrived — until he didn’t — in two very different political systems. When he came to the United States, he cultivated political relationships to burnish his image, but this time it was with members of the American right, especially Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump. By early 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla…
It’s well worth your time to read the whole thing. May all TFG’s associates come to similar much-deserved ends!
War for Ukraine Day 874: Ukraine Falls Back from Krynky
piratedan
may he be closer to the beginning of the Conga-line of crooks than the end of associates of 45 who find themselves with a conviction.
Bupalos
Are these state charges I hope?
sab
@Bupalos: Federal jury found him guilty of fraud.
moonbat
I always love seeing one of these financiers of right wing crypto dreams go down if for no other reason than they can no longer prop up poisonous sweaty grifters like Bannon.
More of this please. I’m convinced that if we collected taxes from these 1 percenters at a proper rate (say at least 50%) and started seriously prosecuting white collar crime in this country we’d have a lot less folks with the money to buy the vice presidential candidate of their choice, for starters.
Another Scott
ETTBTD??
:-/
Arrested March 15, 2023. Convicted July 16, 2024. Pretty speedy for a big white-collar crime case.
More, please.
Thanks, AL.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chet Murthy
@Another Scott: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12709165/Bill-Clinton-Tony-Blair-pop-stars-supermodels-Bitcoin-fraudster.html
scroll down to see Slick Willie and Blair on stage with Federal Prisoner and former FTX CEO Sam Bankrun-Fraud.
sdhays
@Another Scott: Yeah, it turns out Tony Blair was really showing us who he really is when he backed W to the hilt on Iraq.
Sister Golden Bear
Pundits: “This is why it’s bad news for Biden, and he should
step asideresign immediately and appoint Trump president….” /sAnoniminous
We make our own yoghurt and kefir because they are 1/3 of the price of store bought and double the flavor. Want to buy some glass jars to put them in. Glass jars at Amazon with reusable lids in the size we want run between $9 and $15. At the local supermarket we can buy spaghetti sauce in a slightly smaller size heavy reuseable glass jar with a reusable lid for under $3. So it’s way cheaper to buy spaghetti sauce and throw the sauce away than to buy just the jar the sauce comes in through Amazon.
I understand we’re not buying in quantity and our cost will reflect that …. but …. jeez … three to five hundred percent mark-up?
sdhays
@Chet Murthy: I try to contextualize the Clinton Presidency in that he was probably the best the country at the time would tolerate, but man am I ready to not hear about him any more.
Chet Murthy
@Anoniminous: I have to ask: you can’t find Ball (or Mason) canning jars at your local organic co-op? That’s where I got a 12-pack years ago …. still usin’ ’em. Though who knows: maybe they’re not strong enough to hold in the gases? I had a friend who made kefir and put too much sugar in. When it exploded it took most of the contents of the jar and spread it all over his kitchen.
sdhays
@Anoniminous: It’s Prime Day. Don’t you know that means you have to hand over your wallet to Jeff Bezos?
danielx
None of those things are crimes but being a lying cheating scumbag to indulge those tastes is a crime. And Federal prosecutors really don’t like to lose…
sdhays
@danielx: Well, to be fair, it is a crime to wear tan suits if you’re a black President.
Anoniminous
@Chet Murthy:
Believe me, we looked. Everything is a one use lid. We’d have to buy the jars and then pay another $16 to get reusable lids.
JanieM
@Anoniminous: I have a bunch of glass gallon jugs that I bought from Specialty Bottle. I don’t know if they’ll have what you want, and the shipping might make it hard for them to compete with the spaghetti solution, but it might be worth checking out.
Chris
So the man used to be a CCP-friendly insider, and when he fell out of favor and came to America, he found that the people he was most comfortable among were conservative Republican billionaires.
There’s a lesson here, I just know it…
Anoniminous
@sdhays:
The irritating thing is we’re in the middle of bumphuck New Mexico and either have to buy this kind of thing from Amazon (yuck) or WalMart (double yuck) or drive 160 miles. At least if we buy from Amazon we don’t have to fork over $$$ to the oil companies.
Chet Murthy
@Anoniminous: I confess to surprise that you could find store-bought spaghetti sauce in jars with reusable lids that were better than canning-jar lids.
Salty Sam
Anoniminous
@Chet Murthy:
We want the live cultures so we can’t do the canning thing.
Soprano2
@Anoniminous: I have a whole bunch of them I wish I could give to you, but mine are regular canning jars.
Salty Sam
Sugar!? I’ve been making my own kefir for years, and never heard of adding sugar. (Not calling you out here, I just have genuinely never heard of such a thing. )
Chet Murthy
@Salty Sam: I’ve never made it; we were having a drink a couple of days ago, and he was telling me about the experience, and yeah, his recipe called for sugar. That’s all I know.
danielx
@Chet Murthy:
Small pickle jar: perfect for mixing up (some) salad dressings, marinades, etc.
Chet Murthy
@danielx: Heh indeed. I use jelly jars. Used to use Bonne Maman jars, but lately I’ve been getting Tiptree Marmalade, and those jars are *perfect*. But I doubt the lids are safe against gase pressure buildup.
Anoniminous
@JanieM:
The cost of the bottle plus shipping puts it out of reach.
Thanks for the tip!
Aussie Sheila
@danielx:
Actually as someone once wrote, ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime’.
Investigate the obscenely wealthy. Something will always be found, and it saves time and money scrabbling after shop lifters.
Salty Sam
Maybe he was making kombucha? Similar process, but yeah, kombucha requires added sugar and can explode…
CaseyL
@Chris: Both Russia and China are oligarchies. Russia just used to masquerade as Communist.
China still does, but I can’t think of anything, offhand, that is “communist” about the place. Certainly not in any Marxist sense.
Oligarchs like other oligarchs. There is no ideology; only wealth.
Chet Murthy
@Salty Sam: no, it was kefir. he’s been on a kefir kick of late.
NotMax
@Anoniminous
Tried a local Ace hardware?
Maybe it’s by brand but can’t quite see how lids on spaghetti sauce jars stand up to being sterilized without some deformation or cost to integrity.
CaseyL
@Anoniminous:
Do you have Craig’s List where you are? There might be canning jars for sale under “Household.” I checked and saw some here, in the Seattle listings. Though I’m not sure the prices are better than $3 emptied sauce jars.
Chet Murthy
@Salty Sam: This is the stuff my friend was using: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010PBELYY
needs cane sugar apparently.
BeautifulPlumage
@Anoniminous:
I hope you understand the difference between tempered glass and regular glass. This is exactly why folks shouldn’t use reused condiment/sauce jars. I get that you’re not canning in them, but the ability to contain fermented contents is exactly why you ONLY use canning jars. You won’t have a problem until you do. The lid is NOT the integral part of the container. YMMV.
Anoniminous
@NotMax:
Ace Hardware: Yep and nope.
Sterilization: hot water and bleach is Your Friend
Another key: put it in the ‘fridge, use it, don’t let it sit around. Full Disclosure: We have had to toss a container ‘ere now & again
Jay
@Anoniminous:
Typical home canning jars are a three piece system, the jar, the ring close, the snap lid.
The lid has a rubber seal, that is a “one time” use because it crimps down on the lip of the canning jar to form a “perfect” airtight seal.
This seal is critical for many home canned goods.
Here the store pasta sauce lids are a one piece “single use” lid. It also relies on a rubber ring seal.
A cheat to reusing lids for some canning uses is to use a oil seal/parrafin/honey when suitable.
12 snap lids range in price here from $5CDN to $8CDN.
You can also buy the full snap lid/ring assembly separately and the fit the standard Atlas/Bernadin jars that most pasta sauce here comes in.
danielx
@Anoniminous:
How large a jar do you want?
I mean, Walmart has 16 oz mason jars with lids at a dozen for $13.44.
Another Scott
@Anoniminous:
Tractor Supply?
They seem to be in NM, but I don’t know if they’re any closer.
IIRC, canning jars were one of the things that were impossible to find in the early parts of the pandemic. Maybe it’s still not quite back to “normal”.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kayla Rudbek
I am rapidly approaching having too few active crafting projects and I’m trying to decide which ones to bring out of hibernation (versus starting a new project). The criteria are that they must be easy enough so I can sit on the couch and watch the Tour de France or the Olympics as my hands are going (so probably not ones with cables or the one where I had to print out the pattern on paper and tape the charts together), and that they preferably don’t have white, cream, teal, or gray as the main color (I just finished a rainbow and cream shawl and a pair of white/green/red striped socks, and I have a gray and teal shawl that I think I may finish this week). Stamped cross stitch appears to be fairly quick, at least so far, and if I ever get the loom warped up, that would go quickly as well. So far I’m looking at pulling a blue/gold shawl and pink/cream striped socks out of hibernation, and completing the superhero cross stitch keychain set.
If I do decide to start something new, I may pull out a shawl kit In charcoal gray and gold, and I should start my sibling’s Christmas gift for a cross stitch project.
Jackie
Wasn’t Steve Bannon arrested on Guo Wengui’s yaught, charged for federal fraud re bilking donors of Building the Wall Go Fund Me? Pardoned by TCFG and now going to trial on NY STATE charges?
It’s amazing how everyone touched by TCFG ends up in prison – EXCEPT the person who got them there.
As the song goes 🎶 “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”🎶
NotMax
@Anoniminous
Personally would not put trust in hot water. Boiling water, yes. Hot, no.
As for bleach, toxic; too chancy. YMMV.
Also too, Instant Pot does a good job making yogurt.
Chris
@Aussie Sheila:
Yep.
It’s funny. The first time I watched through Leverage, I ended up a teensy bit disappointed at the number of times the bad guys, especially the major ones, turned out to be actual criminals in the judicial sense of the word, rather than just power-abusing scumbags whose crimes were 100% legal. Felt like the show was falling back on police procedural logic instead of fully exploring the options offered by a Robin Hood show.
But coming back to it later, especially after not only more years of Great Recession but also Trump, it didn’t bother me that much, because by that point I’d realized the distinction between “actual lawbreaking criminal” and “not a criminal, the real crime is what’s legal” is actually tissue-thin. The vast majority of people who are rich enough for us to know their names are just as much monstrosities in a legal sense as a human one. Yeah, a lot of their abuses happen because the law allows them power they never should’ve had. But a lot of their abuses happen because the relevant government departments are massively under-resourced, because politicians direct them with various degrees of explicitness to ignore certain crimes by certain people, or simply because the victims don’t dare to pursue legal options against people who can afford an endless mob of not only lawyers but spin doctors, researchers, private detectives, and other people that can harass them into silence.
Trump’s “that makes me smart” is how they all think.
Ealbert
Since this seems to have turned into a open thread, something I have wondered: the secret documents that Trump took, were these original documents, or does the agency print out a copy that is then probably destroyed when the president is done with it? Because if it is an original, that would mean that the government has lost a lot of information.
Chet Murthy
@Chris: The largest type of property crime by -value- is accounting control fraud.
Chet Murthy
@Ealbert: I don’t know for sure, but this is the 21st century, and the idea that the government doesn’t keep the originals in classified computer systems is ….. pretty difficult to believe. There were references to “classified printers” at least a few times during the discussions of these crimes.
Manyakitty
@Aussie Sheila: “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.”
Mario Puzo, epigraph from The Godfather.
Chris
@CaseyL:
My general theory of politics is that all systems when left to themselves trend towards aristocracy. Whether it’s a literal hereditary nobility, a capitalist oligarchy, a communist Inner Party, or whatever else you can think of, the rich, powerful, and connected will use what they have to hoard more and more of the money, power, and connections to themselves, pass them on to their kids or at least their chosen successors, lock everyone else out, and progressively leave them with less and less.
Hence, the “it’s all oligarchy” result. No matter what the official ideology is.
It’s not doomed to happen, but it’s the way the system’s inertia will work if there’s nothing to counteract it. It generally takes significant course corrections to derail it. The Lincoln years were one such correction. The FDR years were another. We’re overdue for another one, and I hope we get it.
Chet Murthy
@Manyakitty: I think that’s Honore’ de Balzac, no? This an interesting investigation: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime/
Manyakitty
@Chet Murthy: could well be. I encountered it in The Godfather, but it’s reasonable to think Puzo read Balzac.
Poe Larity
Would it be worth another Trump presidency to see Thiel and Musk in jail…
Don’t conflict me.
Jay
@Chet Murthy:
Globally, proven accounting control fraud cost Corporations, Companies and Governments $3.1 billion dollars in a one year period spanning 2022 and 2023.
https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/report-worldwide-organizations-lose-billions-to-fraud-032124
Proven Wage Theft is over $50 billion dollars a year in the US alone.
Chet Murthy
@Jay: I did not know. I’ll update my priors!
wjca
Pretty much how we do it as well. (Including the occasional discards. But still well worth it.)
Manyakitty
@Poe Larity: their imprisonment is more likely if Biden wins.
Chet Murthy
@Manyakitty: I would think that the only oligarchs who will be hurt by TCFG if he retakes power, are those who cross him. As long as Musk & Thiel stay in his good graces (the instructive lesson would be Fritz Thyssen who decided to disagree w/Hitler and paid the price) they’ll do fine.
Jay
@Chet Murthy:
Well, you were looking for a “Great Crime”,……… : )
And very few of the victims ever get justice.
Chet Murthy
@Jay: A-yup. And as it turns out, the same culprits in both sorts of crimes, I’d guess.
Tom Q
@Manyakitty:
I believe Puzo attributed it to Balzac in the front of The Godfather. At least, it’s the way I remember it, 50-plus years on.
NotMax
@Ealbert:
Whatever constitutes an “original” should be retained by the originating agency/department/office/committee. Copies or facsimiles of originals do not abound but exist are passed through to those with appropriate level of clearance.
Geminid
@Tom Q: I thought it was Pogo.
NotMax
@Chet Murthy
Did someone say … Balzac?
:)
NotMax
@Geminid
Blast from the past. Before the internet, before Fox, before hate radio, Walt Kelly’s Pogo had the RWNJ media landscape’s number.
(And no, not the more famous Pogo panel you might have expected.)
Aussie Sheila
@Jay:
Yes, it was Balzac. Thank you Chet M. And yes, accounting fraud is a massive crime for which hardly anybody ever gets banged up.
I’d like to see Dems start pushing the ‘wage theft costs working Americans billions of dollars a year’.
What about the paid overtime rules that trump abolished? Where’s the noise about that?
It would be a great line for Biden/Harris.
Splitting Image
@NotMax:
My favourite Pogo cartoon is the one with Simple J. Malarkey advancing on Mole brandishing an axe and daring Mole to shoot him because his gun has probably jammed from falling into a barrel of tar. Mole invites Malarkey to step forward so they can test that theory.
It pleases me greatly that this sort of wholesome entertainment used to grace the pages of major newspapers across the country.
Aussie Sheila
@Aussie Sheila:
I know there will be rightly, women telling their stories about being denied health care at the Dem convention. But I hope there will also be women and men speaking about being able to unionise and about how their lives were turned around when they got one of those well paid union jobs delivered by the IRAct.
It’s just criminal political malpractice to allow the republicans to be making a play for working class voters.
That is a ‘brand’ that should never have been let go.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila: https://x.com/aobrien2010/status/1813196443378684129
I knew about Reagan, but not about Nixon.
SomeRandomGuy
And this is GOOD NEWS…
for John McCain.
(Well, in a backhanded sort of way….)
Martin
@Chet Murthy: The best endorsement was the Air Traffic Controllers Union (PATCO) backing Reagan, who then after winning declared them a threat to national safety and fired 90% of them. The union no longer existed by the end of 1981.
You’d think they’d learn.
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
I knew all that about the Teamsters even before I worked with US unions 30 years ago. Apologies if this is harsh.
But US unions have been among the most corrupt and useless unions in the western world in my lifetime.
I hasten to say that it has turned around in the last 15-20 years. But by God it needed to.
Not all US unions of course. But enough to make them a general ‘shoulder shrug’ among honest, militant unions elsewhere.
That’s why I was so anxious to work there for a while.
It’s always been my view that the US working class was a sleeping giant during the Cold War, and once wakened could shake things up globally.
I still believe that.
prostratedragon
@Jackie: Correct. The trial was to have been presided over in September by Justice Juan Merchan, but he
has had quite enough of these bastards, thank youhas another complex proceeding near that time. Bannon will have a premliminary appearnce before another justice next week (story).NotMax
@Chet Murthy
Jimmy Hoffa was by no possible stretch of the imagination a lefty.
prostratedragon
Audience reactions to Biden’s speech at the NAACP convention.
Aussie Sheila
@Martin:
Right wing unions aren’t confined to the US. It’s just that there isn’t a formal institutional link between unions and the only political Party interested in amelioration of working class wages and conditions. And to be clear.
That situation has been a strategic choice of the US union movement. I happen to think they were wrong in that.
But it’s their movement, and they need to be better at honest, militant organising, because industrial organising is all they have.
Aussie Sheila
@NotMax:
No, he was a corrupt mafia infected scum bag. But he was in fact much more effective for his members than the corrupt arseholes that were put in his place when he was banged up.
I’m not excusing him at all.
But his kind of union politics and industrial strategy is typical of unions in a ‘low cost of entry’ industry like trucking, and he did indeed make significant gains for his members during the 50s and 60s. That’s what you get when you don’t link your movement to a political party that reflects and is required to reflect, the needs and aspirations of the working class, however imperfectly at times.
Chet Murthy
@NotMax: I was a kid during Nixon. A young adult during Reagan, but already knew he was a piece of shit (mom told me about what he did to Medicare, and that was enough).
I’ve read about the way that union workers attacked antiwar protestors, seen the pics, etc. It is what it is. I think that more recently the way that unions are working to organize health aides, service workers, etc, is going to help. But it’s so disappointing, watching how slow progress is. I worked for a year at a tech company and took a bus to-and-from the office. I got friendly with a couple of the drivers, and when I heard that the drivers were trying to unionize, I mentioned to one of them that I thought it was a great idea. He said “I get paid well enough, that’s not for me”. Sigh. I mean, I’m just not the guy to persuade people with smooth patter, so I let it rest. Sigh. I remember when my mom was with the IRS, and she told me about how her union had her back, made sure her workplace was a just place. It was about more than money.
NotMax
@Chet Murthy
Thing is, as horrid a politician as he was, before switching from D to R, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild — twice..
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
It’s not necessary for every worker to be a member of their union. But it’s necessary for union density to be sufficient across a number of industries and sectors such that the union wage becomes de facto, the retention wage for that industry/sector.
That’s where the US union movement fucked themselves. Shop by shop bargaining, together with density in sectors that could be easily shipped overseas, together with a complete lack of strategy in dealing with rolling neo liberalism made for a wipeout, particularly once the Cold War was over. That bargain was done once the US ruling class no longer needed the particular ‘patriotism above class loyalty’ that the Cold War imposed on them.
A bitter lesson that I hope has been taken to heart.
No political Party over which you have institutional leverage, meaning policies and personal, and a working class saturated with racism and easily divided.
A recipe for disaster.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila:
and misogyny too.
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
Of course. I’m well acquainted with that. But in a well organised and politically savvy movement with a strong ‘left and emancipist’ tradition, the misogyny can be overcome.
So can the racism.
But a movement committed to ‘shop by shop’ unionism is always hampered by the next shop down the road.
That is the fundamental weakness of the US TU movt.
And it goes way back to arguments between the IWW and others in the late 19th and early 20th century US union movement.
Im less concerned with the deep thoughts of every person in a movement than I am with the ability to make material changes to the lives of working people no matter who they are or where they live.
I can’t stand righteous preaching that doesn’t offer a way for ordinary people taking and using power to make their lives better.
Tony Jay
Observe my shocked face. After all, Blair’s entire career both before and after his Premierships was all about making himself known and useful to people, powers and institutions that could make him rich and ‘respectable’.
But “Waaaahhhhhh!” cry the cultists, “He must be a venerable icon because he won elections!” Except a petri-dish full of bacteria could have won in 1997 as long as it wasn’t wearing a blue rosette, and any Labour leader (up to and including a Right Honourable precariously balanced brick with a face painted on it) could have beaten the flailing Tories of the early 21st century, and most of them wouldn’t have shed millions of votes in the process and set the scene for Labour’s post-2010 collapse.
I’d have liked to see Blair work his magic with most of his Parliamentary Party and the entire Media working to elect the other side, but that was always Blair’s real trick – stocking the Party with loyalists (it’s not Stalinist if you’re doing it from the Right) and making the Establishment immensely comfortable with his style of Labour/Not Really business-friendly greasiness.
Says everything that he’s now sitting on a pile of cash from ‘advising’ bloodstained dictators and rapacious vulture capitalists. And nothing says ‘centre-left thought leader’ like spewing hate against Trans people.
Wanker.
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
Yes he is a wanker. But a successful one, until he wasn’t . Like our PM Hawke. One minute Australian Trade Union Movement President, next Prime Minister, and meeting regularly with the US Embassy from the early 70s on to ‘shop’ the Australian left to our U.S. Masters.
He was very successful, and saved the Australian working class from the worst of Anglo neo liberalism during his tenure from 1983-1992.
We got a national health scheme that had been abolished by the tory government in 1976, better social wage provision overall including anti discrimination laws that assisted women, immigrants and indigenous people. In return, the Australian TU movt agreed to moderate industrial wage demands for five years, and the arseholes privatised the Commonwealth Bank, the worst privatisation decision ever.
Nevertheless, I worked and watched neo liberalism stalk the Anglo sphere for twenty years, and out of the UK, the US and Oz, I reckon we survived the best, with an intact union movement, albeit diminished in numbers, and a Labor Party that didn’t lose its ‘brand’ as a working class Party.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
Here, what gutted Unionism was tiering. The recessions/inflation/interest rates of the early 80’s were used, by Government and Employers, to pressure the Unions, and the Union Members agreed to an IGMFU program.
Old members got a living wage, benefits and pensions, “new” workers got minimum wage, half benefits and a 3% RRSP match, if they could make enough money to put some aside in an RRSP.
Aussie Sheila
@Jay:
Sure, but you didn’t have the discipline and political clout to convert the demands for lower wage inflation to a claim for a better social wage and a less brutal racial and gendered labor market.
That’s what we did.
Was it perfect? No, it fucking well wasn’t.
Was it better than the US?
Abso fucking lutely.
I worked in the US in the ‘90s. I knew a lot about the US labor movement before. But it was a revelation.
And not in a good way.
Oh, and btw, tiered settlements were resolutely resisted here. Everywhere.
Tony Jay
In a FPTP electoral system like ours, it’s often enough just to be less hated than the other guy. That was the key to Flobalob’s victory in 2019 – he barely shifted the Tory vote, but the Media and the Labour Right combined with the Israeli Right’s foreign lobby to lose about 3 million votes from Labour’s tally. Blair shed a similar number between 1997/2005, but the Tories just couldn’t attract many of them and the Lib Dem’s, by running to that vague ground sort of to newlabourinc’s left while still attractive to soft Tories, attracted a lot of votes that Clegg’s disastrous foray into coalition with Cameron’s Tories would cost them.
Looking at the figures from the last election you can see the cassus belli for the Great Newnewlabourinc Civil-War flashing bright red. They got a disastrous vote share, losing hundreds of thousands from Corbyn’s 2019 tally (which was apparently the worst result evah!!!) and millions from 2017, but picked up tons of seats because the Tories and the Fascist Frog Party split the Rightwing vote.
The actual Labour Party and most of the centre and left want PR, but the cadre of Labour Rightists in charge right now think they can simply ‘become’ a replacement Tory Party and swap their old electorate for Cameron’s Tory voters. That argument is going to be huge.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
This is in Canada.
The Unions rolled over and agreed to the IGMFU.
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
Love ya work brother, but I have to say this.
I believe tactical voting assisted in driving down UK Labour’s vote overall.
Good. Because the aim of an election is to win, not stack up votes in places where a half plus one means a win, but 10,000 votes in a safe seat go nowhere.
The advanced capitalist working class has been remade over the last generation. I don’t expect political parties to get out in front of that.
They need 50% plus one in FPTP voting systems to win seats, thus political power.
However I do expect conscious left wingers to understand the state they are in and to act accordingly. And most particularly I expect them to formulate demands on their parties and trade unions that look to the immense restructuring of capital and the working class that has occurred over the last quarter century.
That now includes an end to FPtP voting, and strengthened workplace rights that reflect a completely restructured industrial landscape and working class.
Any left strategy that doesn’t recognise the changes of the last quarter century is bankrupt, and isn’t a serious left movement.
Citizen Alan
@sdhays: This will sound awful I know (and I like the Big Dawg despite his flaws), but I truly think that if Bill had died of that heart attack in 2004, Hillary would have won in 2016 and might well have won in 2008. 2016 was so close that “Oh God, Bill’s gonna be back in the White House chasing skirts” might have been enough to tip the election.
prostratedragon
Latest round of funding by DNC to battleground state parties.
Aussie Sheila
@Citizen Alan:
Hard disagree. Comey and the FTFNYT did her in right at the end. Assisted in no small part by a truly undisciplined and typically libertarian US Left that think the most radical ‘takes’ are radical.
The US Greens need to be shot into the sun. They are truly terrible, and I believe though she didn’t know it, Jill Stein was a useful idiot for Putin.
Thats what you get in the absence of voting that permits a wide range of viewpoint to be honestly represented on the ballot via preferential or proportional voting systems
US political parties, all two of them, are simply unable to properly represent electorally the wide range of political opinions in a polity of 335 million people. The tent is now ‘splitting’. It can never be big enough for the fragmented and precarious working population wrought in the last 30 years.
It is what it is. But electoral reform is now urgent in the US and UK.
Tony Jay
All true. Unfortunately the modern version of the Labour Party is under the firm control of people who DO NOT WANT the votes of the Left. They’ve gone out of their way to make it clear that they’d much rather have a Tory coalition, and any of those dirty, dirty Lefties who vote for them should do so with the clear understanding that there will be no room in the manifesto for any of their nonsense and they should just be grateful the grown ups even let them be affiliated with the Party.
I only wish that was actual hyperbole. It’s slightly hyperbolic, but only very slightly.
I guarantee that as soon as the Right sorts out the terms of the Tory/Fascist Frog unification, this Government is living on borrowed time. You simply can’t base a long term electoral strategy on a coalition that delivered 64% of seats to the Party with the lowest vote total since the modern franchise came in and expect to win come election time.
Unsustainable. But they’d rather burn the Party to the ground than change. What we do about that…. fucked if I know.
p.a.
We were at the Millennium Downtown NYC a few years back and a large group of mostly Asians wearing red caps with something like TRC on the hats were staying there. Didn’t know WTF it was, some tourist group we guessed.
Mentioned it on B-Juice when I got home and found out it was a Kwok/Bannon group! TRC (or whatev it was) stood for TheRealChina or some-such.
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
The vast majority of votes were cast against the Tories. That’s a tip. The UK is a social democratic country with a bankrupt electoral system. It’s up to the left to organise electorally and industrially to impose a better and more democratic electoral system.
Think the great reform Acts of the 19th century. Make the 21st century another list of electoral reform Acts. Frankly I couldn’t care less about politically ambitious pollies that want to take their place on the benches.
I care about what people are doing to make them more and better representatives of the people whose votes they covet.
Thats all.
Jeffg166
@Anoniminous: I find plastic mayonnaise jar lids fit the Ball jars.
prostratedragon
Can’t play the vid on my device, but sounds interesting. Dan Przygoda:
prostratedragon
@prostratedragon:
Furthermore,
cmorenc
@sdhays:
Recall that in 2016 it was Bill Clinton’s recklessly stupid indulgence of his gregarious sociability in boarding US Attorney General Lynch’s plane for a chit-chat while she was in charge of the Administration’s investigation into Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s butter-emails! that forced Lynch to turn management of that over to James Comey – who notoriously created a stink just 8 days out from the 2016 election by holding a press conference announcing an additional huge trove of emails had been found on Congresswoman Huma Abedein’s laptop secondary to investigation of her husband Anthony Weiner, that turned out to merely be duplicate copies of ones already investigates? And wound up depressing D turnout just enough to let Drumpf squeak by?
Quaint times those, when the GOP made a huge deal out of a tiny handful of low-level classified docs when a mere 4 years later Trump absconded with entire boxes of the country’s most top-secret information and it’s no big deal to the GOP?
prostratedragon
Manchurian Candidate Blues, David amran; Moochin’ About
Aussie Sheila
@cmorenc:
It was made a huge deal by the mainstream elite US Press and Cable TV. It was then taken on board by ‘serious centrists’ beloved of certain liberal magazines. Then we were off to the races. I remember it well.
I made money betting Clinton would lose.
Not because I wanted her to, but because my knowledge of how US media worked was better than my comrades here, and I guessed they would crucify the mild liberal candidate in a way they never would a Republican.
I was right. I made a tidy sum, and took some anti US comrades out to dinner.
prostratedragon
@prostratedragon:
Did I ever garble the man’s name! It’s David Amram.
Coin drops, Amber Rose edition.
NotMax
@Aussie Sheila
Dinner at Maccas?
:)
TBone
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Aussie Sheila
@NotMax:
No. :) .
A very good Asian/European fusion restaurant.
It was excellent.
Great Australian wines of course, and great food.
A bill of over $AU800. For four.
An absolute bargain and very enjoyable, except for the fact that we knew trump would be a disaster nonpareil. All of us knew the USSC would be smashed and that women would lose their rights to abortion. What a pity the ‘soi dissant’ US Left didn’t think about that before they went swanning off with ‘Hillary the hawke, Donald the dove’ fucking bullshit.
prostratedragon
Top 10 ways P2025/Agenda47 would affect Black America. Rikyah might have posted ths already, but it can’t be said too much.
Gloria DryGarden
@Anoniminous: my ace hardware, and my Kroger grocery stores carry ball or Kerr canning jars, and lid replacements. It might be $2/jar for a box of 12. Also often seen at the thrift stores.
WereBear
Rugged individualism is very appealing, and a part of the American Mythos. But so much of the actual history is obscured to promote that myth. This works against unionism… in that vague, I’m-only-pretending-to-think-about it, way.
They are fearful for their job when they should be taking a grip on their power, no? But they have been socialized to not realize that.
I think this is a basic driver for today’s Trump followers. It obscures the fact that Trumpies are continually shackled by their inability to make their own decisions. They need somebody big and strong to take care of them. Between culture and religion, anyone who doesn’t conform is tormented if they stay, and condemned if they leave.
They aren’t adults. That’s why.
Aussie Sheila
@WereBear:
They are adults.
Acculturated to their circumstances. It’s just that there’s no countervailing institution strong enough to provide a counter narrative. A lot of work has gone into ensuring that, and not enough into challenging it.
The end of the Cold War war was seized by the centre as a celebration of the US as world hegemon, and the ‘end of history’ no less, while the left in the US largely enjoyed the idiocies of Clinton and his band of bandits, unrestrained by any semblance of a Left, or a trade union movement worthy of the name. Simply a political shambles and disgrace.
WereBear
@Aussie Sheila: I’ve lived among them, as an outsider. They aren’t actually mature adults. Their culture works against everyone that way, but to actually be an adult, one has to make up our own minds.
It’s why it gets more and more unhinged. It’s like people who keep dating copies of the troublesome parent.
Look at the Republican Party now. You can’t tell me it’s full of functional adults. Maybe they once were.
But now, they are in a cult.
WereBear
@Aussie Sheila: This is why we don’t have the same grownup attitude towards the very political issues you bring up.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the series Justified, but I can only watch it 2-3 episodes at a time, and then take a long break.
Yes, it’s a crime setting, but for me, it’s also explaining why these things happen. To me, it’s that the Confederacy never let go.
And the religions that broke off to embrace slavery makes chattel of most everyone.
Aussie Sheila
@WereBear:
People everywhere make up their own minds in a social context, not as an act of individual divination of the truth.
My point is there aren’t any strong countervailing institutions in the US to provide a collective and solidaristic counter narrative which is especially necessary when political times are tough. When they are good, or at least, not so brutal those kinds of institutions can infuse people with hope and action which teaches agency and collective power.
WereBear
@Aussie Sheila: Absolutely. But we do have them.
I’m not thrilled with the current DOJ, but I am impressed with Jack Smith. The work of the people who do care, and make that clear.
The party which keeps losing the popular vote has been cheating, and that must be fixed. The mere fact that we’ve had wins this century is driving the Republican madness now.
The fact that they keep degenerating as a party is horrible, but it’s good news for Joe Biden. Any thinking adult left is fleeing from what it has become.
Republicans speaking ill of Republicans? They are breaking their party’s “first law.”
Good. Eliminating self-criticism is how they got here. Refusing to compromise and actually work toward the good of the nation was short term wins but now, potentially horrible losses.
chemiclord
@Chris: That people who desire wealth above all else are willing to do anything to get it, regardless of the political system or society they are working in?
lowtechcyclist
@Chris:
The formulation I came up with a couple decades back was that political power wants to follow economic power. People with lots of money will sooner or later get around to using that money to try to bend the political system to their will, and will succeed enough of the time that the laws and regulations are increasingly favorable to them relative to the rest of us.
We can try to put guardrails on the system, like campaign finance laws, but they’ll attack the guardrails (and with a hand from the Bogus Scotus, they’ve pretty much obliterated them). Really the only solution is confiscatory taxation to limit how much money even rich people can afford to throw at changing the system. And we know from recent history that even that needs to be actively defended. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and all that.
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
Gotta watch the smut those librarians are putting on the shelves! ;-)
lowtechcyclist
@Aussie Sheila:
This is a digression, but can anyone explain to me why in the world our voting system is described as “first past the post”? It’s not just a bad analogy, it’s a nonsensical one.
Like Kurt Vonnegut said about “Cat’s Cradle,” there’s no damned cat, and no damned cradle. Same thing here: there’s no ‘post,’ and there’s no ‘first past’ either.
In a horse race or a foot race, there’s a fixed post, and if you’re the first one past it, you win. Our elections have no fixed ‘post’ unless it’s Election Day itself, and we all get there at the same time, none of us get there first. There’s no fixed number of votes to get first, and there wouldn’t even be any ‘get there first’ because all the votes are counted at the same time.
If there’s any ‘post’ it’s however many votes the other candidate gets, and nobody knows where that ‘post’ is going to be until the votes are counted anyway, and it’s a different ‘post’ for each candidate.
Our system is just ‘most votes wins.’ That’s all. Why is there this other weird term for it?
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: Because it’s “winner take all” in each election. Place and show don’t get anything. It’s usually contrasted with proportional systems.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: Even here in the USA, there are variations. Some places demand that 50%+1 be the winning line, so they have “run-offs”. Which can be good, but has a history of the South in which the whites gang together to prevent Blacks from winning political power.
It’s impossible to make a system that cannot be gamed in some way.
My understanding is that the pathology in the UK is that the Tories, say, could win 35% of the total national vote but end up with 75% of the seats in Parliament. That seems broken. (Our quasi-two-party system in the USA has pathologies, but not like that.) And seems to be the result of having 6+ candidates running for each seat, so any one candidate getting an actual majority in their election is rare.
Of course, they have a Parliamentary system and we don’t, so there are differences.
My bottom line is that the majority must be able to rule (subject to some sensible constraints). That means it must be possible for one side (either a single party or a sensible, stable coalition) to have a majority of the votes. If the political mechanisms are such that that is effectively impossible (because of too many disparate parties or too many nihilists or too many bomb-throwers or too much outside interference or whatever), then that political mechanism needs to change.
If this stuff were easy it would have been fixed long ago. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris
@Aussie Sheila:
The problem is that historically there isn’t an only political party interested in amelioration of working class wages and conditions. Historically, American political parties are loosely aligned confederations of local party organizations whose politics vary wildly, with each party containing at least some conservative, moderate, and progressive factions.
That’s mostly not true anymore, but it was very much true in the days when union organizing really took off. You couldn’t expect unions to just embrace the Democratic Party. In many parts of the country, the Democratic Party was an even bigger problem than the Republican one, and in at least some parts of the country you had Republicans that were willing to support unions to varying degrees.
The current situation is, in historical terms, very new, and unions like everybody else are still playing catch-up.
Manyakitty
@Tom Q: I was going from memory as well. It takes a village to source a quote 🤣
Chris T.
@lowtechcyclist: [Why is it called “first past the post”]
@Eyeroller:
The question is neither about the song itself, nor the name of the song; it’s about why the name of the song is called Haddock’s Eyes. Where’s the metaphorical post?